Local Review: Willow Skye-Biggs – lexen

Willow Skye-Biggs
lexen 

Self-Released
Street: 10.07
lexen = Aphex Twin + Thrupence x Bon Iver / Grimes

For those times when you’d like to enter a different landscape of consciousness, lexen is for you. It sounds like what a mandala looks like, with some accentuating vocals, ASMR, musique concrete and an electric drum machine. It’s the type of composition that’s best enjoyed when the listener takes all distractions away and enters the gaseous soundscape like it’s reality. Think each sonic element through and discover what those sounds could mean personally or what they might mean for the artist, Willow Skye-Biggs. It’s a therapeutic and psychedelic experience, to say the least. Much like a lot of Grimes’ work, the songs are so left field and out of this world that you’re transformed and simultaneously wondering where inside someone this kind of art could come from. 

lexen is made up of just three tracks, but they’re substantial in length and read like a poem. Any vocals heard are imperceptible and meant to add to each track like a multi-medium masterpiece. It’s similar in stature to but not like the meditation music you’d get in your weekly yoga class—it’s more like a guided meditation where the kaleidoscopic sonic scenery is transporting you to a new hallucinatory world. As I listened, I had so many visuals that paired with the sound, and they were all supernatural. I pictured moving through space and watching stars breathe, rapturing and colorful neon lights in a pitch black environment and movement through water that houses celestial life forms. 

The song titles give a small arrow of direction for where Skye-Biggs’ mind was at when creating these intergalactic songs. It’s something to chew on as you listen, like the final track titled “Desire Is Better Than Conceit.” To me, it felt like I could listen in two ways—either use the title as a prompt or hear it in my own way and let my mind wander wherever it pleased. Typically, I chose the latter, but I was curious enough to go back and listen to the song with the title in mind and try to imagine Willow Skye-Biggs writing the track. Maybe she had the title or intention of it before she started writing, or maybe she discovered it as she wrote. 

In the end, these tracks are a work of art that honors the listener and human experience without the fuss of lyrics. The language of lexen belongs to another world. –Mary Culbertson

Read more about Willow Skye-Biggs’ work in the world of film:
Willow Skye-Biggs’ Indeterminate Film Abstractions